RE­PORT­ING LIES

In Geist 105, Al­berto Manguel wrote “Re­port­ing Lies” in re­sponse to Stephanie Nolen’s ar­ti­cle about him, “Page Turner,” that ap­peared in the Globe and Mail in May, 2017.

Ethel Groffier wrote to the Globe and Mail to com­ment on the ar­ti­cle, and sent her let­ter to Geist as well. It reads:

Page turner. Re­ally?

Nolen’s piece was so dis­ap­point­ing! In it, she con­cen­trates on con­tro­ver­sies and petty pol­i­tics in­stead of telling us about Al­berto Manguel’s vi­sion for the Na­tional Li­brary of Ar­gentina, where he is cre­at­ing a vast net­work of in­tel­lec­tual ex­changes, largely thanks to his own in­ter­na­tional fame. The li­brary is be­gin­ning to at­tract praises in Ar­gentina and abroad. Those of us in Mon­treal who had the priv­i­lege of vis­it­ing the ex­hi­bi­tion “The Li­brary at Night,” con­ceived by Robert Lepage on the ba­sis of Manguel’s book of the same ti­tle and his own mag­nif­i­cent per­sonal li­brary, have an idea of what the in­ter­view could have been if the in­ter­viewer had been re­ally in­ter­ested in li­braries rather than in gos­sip. The open­ing of the ex­hi­bi­tion in the Bi­b­lio­thèque Na­tionale in Paris will no doubt re­flect favourably on its coun­ter­part in Buenos Aires.